Itsik Kipnis, “Tsvishn yidn” (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [State Archive of the Russian Federation], abbreviated GARF), f. 8114, op. 1, d. 297, l. 118, a copy in the Yad Vashem Archives, JM/26187). An abbreviated translation of Kipnis’s Yiddish-language essay appeared in Russian under the title “Babii Iar” in the Babii Iar collection, which was published in Israel in 1981, pp. 71–74. A translation of one of the more complete versions of Kipnis’s essay was published in the newsletter Golokost i suchasnist’, No. 4 (10), 2003, pp. 1–2.

Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 191–193. His claims are largely based on a letter by Jewish combat veterans to Stalin, Molotov, and Pospelov, complaining about the Ukrainian authorities’ pandering to anti-Semites (Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR ot nachala i do kul’minatsii 1938–1953: Dokumenty [Moscow: Demokratiia, 2005], pp. 65–72).

This spontaneous act of commemoration by Jews, which took place in Babi Yar on September 29, 1944, was monitored by the authorities. Those mid-level functionaries in the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Party who were hostile to Jews tended to view it as a manifestation of Jewish nationalism. Taking their cue from similar accusations that had been made in the late 1930s, they tried to reduce it to an attempt by “Zionist elements to organize a mass demonstration by the Jewish population in Kiev on the anniversary of the German massacre at Babi Yar” (Vladimir Khanin, Documents on Ukrainian Jewish Identity and Emigration, 1944–1990 [London-Portland: Frank Cass], p. 51). Another document from the same time period leveled virtually identical accusations of nationalism (“trying to organize a mass demonstration by the Jewish population of Kiev”) at the Yiddish-language poet David Hofshteyn, referring to information obtained from the People’s Commissariat for State Security (ibid., p. 56). Nevertheless, it seems that the Ukrainian authorities, including the People’s Commissariat for State Security, decided not to interfere with the Jewish commemoration activities on that occasion.

For a detailed analysis of the Jewish theme in this cycle of poems by Ilya Ehrenburg, which is dedicated to Babi Yar, see: Shrayer, “Jewish-Russian Poets Bearing Witness to the Shoah, 1941–1946: Textual Evidence and Preliminary Conclusions,” pp. 73–85.

On the Soviet bureaucracy’s demands for similar attitudes to different ethnic groups of victims see, for example, Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism: a Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), pp. 285–296.

Studies by Karel Berkhoff, Mordechai Altshuler, and Dov Ber Kerler1 have shown that the topic of the Holocaust was present in the Soviet media to a far greater extent than was previously assumed. In addition to information about Jewish deaths that was conveyed through newspapers and eyewitness accounts, the interpretation of data and the interpersonal exchange of knowledge and opinions played a particularly important role in understanding the Holocaust. In numerous instances Soviet Jews had no need of an explicit reference to the Jewishness of the victims, especially once the Nazis’ special policy vis-à-vis the Jews had become obvious to many. Nevertheless, one has to wonder: What kind of information could be gleaned by a concerned Soviet Jew from the relatively scant reports on the massacre of the Jews in Babi Yar that appeared in the wartime Soviet media? How did the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia depict these tragic events? How did their views change after the liberation of Kiev in November 1943, when information about the events of September 29–30, 1941 became more extensive? In addition, which methods for transmitting the “Jewish” content of Babi Yar existed in those days, and how did the position of the Soviet authorities affect this transmission?

Babi Yar in the Soviet press

In an essay entitled “Tsvishn yidn” (“Among Jews”), better known under the title “Babi Yar,” Kiev-based Yiddish-language author Itsik Kipnis wrote in the autumn of 1944: “September 29. A terrible date. In plain Yiddish, it is a yortsayt… We used to light candles and say Kaddish on yortsayt. But we have yet to build a synagogue, a temple, big enough to contain all the fire, all the lit candles that might illuminate the name of every murdered Jew of such a large city.”2 By this time, Soviet Jews already possessed considerable information about the events that had taken place at Babi Yar. The vague hopes that their relatives may have survived in Nazi-occupied Kiev had been dashed. Nevertheless, the demand for knowledge about Babi Yar, which had originated amid the worries and uncertainties of the first war years, did not slacken following the liberation of the city.

Information about the mass murder of the Jews of Kiev began to filter into the Russian-language press relatively early. Already in November 1941, over a 10-day interval, two articles appeared in Pravda and Izvestiia referring to the massacre of 52 thousand Kiev Jews, which had taken place on September 29–30, 1941, at Babi Yar, not far from the Jewish cemetery3. “Molotov’s Note,” which was published on January 7, 1942, provided a fairly detailed description of the killing process on the basis of accounts given by “Soviet citizens who escaped from Kiev.” Those who read the November reports in the press — including Jews whose relatives had stayed behind in Kiev — understood who this referred to4.

Prior to the liberation of Kiev in early November 1943, the Soviet military and civilian authorities could obtain information of this kind from a rather limited range of sources — primarily from the political administrations of the armies and from partisan headquarters. This data was based on the accounts of officers and soldiers who had managed to leave the occupation zone, and on reports by Soviet spies and partisans5.

The attention of the Russian-language press to the massacre of the Jews at Babi Yar increased following the liberation of Kiev on November 6, 1943, when new eyewitness accounts of the murder of the Jews of the Ukrainian capital emerged. Many new details were mentioned in an article by Evgenii Kriger in Izvestiia, and in articles by Konstantin Bukovskii, Alexander Avdeenko, and Petr Olender in Krasnaya Zvezda6. These developments took place against the backdrop of an increased focus on the part of the Soviet propaganda apparatus on Nazi war crimes in general, and on Babi Yar, as one of the symbols of Nazi brutality in Kiev, in particular7.

In June 1942, the Jews acquired a new source of information: the Yiddish-language newspaper Eynikayt, which was published by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (abbreviated JAC) and provided regular and relatively extensive updates on the fate of the Jews during the war. Compared to its Russian-language counterparts, Eynikayt tended to provide more detailed coverage of the extermination of the Jews, and its “Jewish” orientation was predetermined by its very nature. Occasionally, it published firsthand testimonies. On October 15, 1942, in an article entitled “Gebenchte erd” (“Promised Land”), Ilya Ehrenburg quoted from a diary by Herbert Becher, a German Gefreiter who had been one of the perpetrators of the Babi Yar massacre and was later killed in action: “This was the hardest job that I can recall. The colonel declared that in this way we had just exterminated 56 thousand enemies of Germany.”8 On April 5, 1943, when Kiev was still occupied by the Nazis, Eynikayt published a testimony by Mikhl Tanklevski, who had finally managed to reach Soviet-controlled territory in January 1943, after a lengthy and perilous odyssey. In all likelihood, the Jewish readership placed a special trust in a periodical written by Jews and for Jews — it is no accident that this account by a Jew from Kiev, which was recorded by Shmuel Gordon, was reprinted in the Palestine-based Davar newspaper a week later9. Publications of this type reflected the need to bring testimonies of the Holocaust to the attention of a large audience — a need that was widely felt among the ethnically-conscious Jewish intelligentsia (and among the Jewish survivors themselves) during the war. The article in Eynikayt begins by emphasizing the fact that Tanklevski made a visit to Kuibyshev, where the JAC and the offices of Eynikayt were located, for the express purpose of “informing the world” about what had taken place in Kiev. In the article, he recounted how, through the window of the apartment in which he had been hiding, he had watched thousands of Jews, including his sister with her family and his ailing father, “making their final journey from the city to the cemetery.” He reported that 56 thousand Jews had been murdered over a period of 3 days, and that the wounded had been buried alive (apparently, the number of victims was copied from Ehrenburg’s article)10.

Nevertheless, Eynikayt did not single out Babi Yar from among the other mass killing sites of Soviet Jews — and neither, for that matter, did the Russian-language newspapers. This attitude stemmed from the general objectives of the intelligentsia, which tried to portray the universality of the Jewish tragedy in order to mobilize Jews from different regions to fight together against their common enemy (Babi Yar was just one of many similar sites); from the need to express their own view of the disaster that engulfed the Jews, and from the fact that new information about the events at Babi Yar was scarce. In an article entitled “Di daychishe fashistn tor nit lebn blaybn” (“The German Fascists Must Not Remain Alive”), which was published in Eynikayt on November 4, 1943 (on the eve of the liberation of Kiev), Ilya Ehrenburg mentions Babi Yar alongside many other mass killing sites of Jews. He exhorts his readers to kill the enemy to avenge “the elderly Jewish mother. The little children. Babi Yar in Kiev. The death pits in Vitebsk and in Minsk.”11 In another, later text, written after the liberation of Kiev, Ehrenburg describes a scene from the Babi Yar massacre in which a little girl cried out of a pit that was being covered: “Why are you shoveling sand into my eyes?” (this episode was taken from a letter by Evsei Lantsman) — in addition to other, no less shocking details of the murder of the Jews in Piriatin and Kozelets12. The dearth of information about Babi Yar is also typical of texts by many Yiddish-language authors. In two essays about Kiev published in Eynikayt in May and November 1943, David Bergelson merely mentions the fact that tens of thousands of Kiev Jews had been shot13.

In August–September 1943, the Nazis obliterated all traces of the mass murder of Kiev residents at Babi Yar, and this elicited a particularly harsh response from the Jewish intelligentsia. News of this Aktion reached the Jews due to the mass escape of prisoners from a special squad that had been assigned to the exhumation and burning of the bodies of tens of thousands of victims. The exhumation was carried out under German supervision, in conditions of utmost secrecy (the escape attempt took place on the night of September 28–29, 1943; 18 escapees — both Jews and non-Jews — managed to break through the heavy guard and survive until liberation). In April 1944, Itzik Fefer — a Yiddish poet who had lost relatives at Babi Yar and whose works had become increasingly focused on the ethnic theme during the war — said in his speech at the Third Anti-Fascist Meeting of Representatives of the Jewish People in Moscow:

Before retreating from Kiev, the Nazis dug up Babi Yar, burned the remains of our fathers and mothers, our brothers and sisters, and scattered the ashes in the wind, thinking that the wind would blow away the secret of their misdeeds. But the ashes of Babi Yar are scorching out hearts; the flames are burning in our eyes; the ashes are covering our smarting wounds, and will not let us rest.14

Eynikayt published articles by Yiddish-language author Ikhil Falikman and Yiddish literary critic Moyshe Mizhiritski dealing with the Nazi attempt to cover up their crimes and with the prisoner escape. In Falikman’s article, which appeared in February 1944, Yankel Kaper, a surviving escapee from Babi Yar, gave a detailed account of the process of exhuming and burning the bodies of the victims, and provided an account of the prisoners’ escape. According to this article, the pits mostly contained the remains of Jews who had been killed in late September 194115. Unlike Falikman’s text, which was based on the testimony of single Jew, Mizhiritski’s lengthy article, which appeared in March 1945 under the typical headline “The Uprising at Babi Yar,” was written on the basis of materials gathered by the Cabinet of Jewish Culture in Kiev, and was devoted primarily to the planning and execution of the escape itself16.

Both articles fully adhered to the general trends of wartime Soviet Jewish journalism, which was aimed not only at describing the fate of the Jews, but also at emphasizing the fact that, even under such extreme conditions, the Jews resisted the Nazis and did everything in their power to defend their national honor and vanquish the enemy. This view could be exemplified by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, by the resistance in Luninets, and by the escape of the inmates from Babi Yar (it is no accident that all of these events were grouped under the single heading of “Oyfshtand” — “uprising”)17. It could also be expressed through the actions of a single individual, who did not even have to engage in open resistance. Falikman — who, at that time, was a captain on active duty in the Red Army — concluded his article in Eynikayt by stating that, immediately after the liberation of Kiev, Kaper donated 50 gold rubles to the Defense Fund; he had gathered this money from the corpses of the victims at Babi Yar, and refrained from handing it over to the Germans despite the mortal risk he was taking18.

Babi Yar — a “Site of Memory” of the Jews of Kiev

During the war years, the Jews of Kiev — and Jews all over the country, for that matter — were bitterly disappointed by the unwillingness of the Soviet authorities to recognize the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Additionally, Amir Weiner has shown that, in their utterances, Kiev Jews tended to equate the anti-Semitism of the Ukrainian bureaucracy with Nazi anti-Semitism, and the pogrom that took place in Kiev in September 1945 was linked to the anti-Semitic attitudes of the local population — attitudes that were abetted by the Soviet bureaucracy19.

Throughout the war period, and especially following the liberation of Kiev and the return of many evacuees to the city, the Jews of Kiev strove to emphasize the special status of this city in their history and consciousness. In May 1943, wishing to draw attention to the long Jewish presence in the city, David Bergelson wrote in Eynikayt: “the Torah spread from Kiev.”20 The Jews felt an urgent need to assert that their history as a people would go on - despite the Babi Yar massacre and hostility on the part of some of the locals. In order to underline the failure of the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to completely exterminate the Jews, Itsik Kipnis wrote in his essay “Among Jews”: “My enemies will not be able to say: ‘Baby Yar is the final resting place of the Jewish people. The last station of Jewish existence. The last word in the story of the Jewish people.’” Moreover, he wrote explicitly: “‘Am Yisrael Chai’ — ‘The Jewish people lives.’”21 An even more remarkable public manifestation of the popularity of this mindset among Kiev Jews was the lengthy ovation given by the public during a performance of Moyshe Pinchevsky’s play I Live by the Ukrainian State Jewish Theater. The ovation began when the curtain parted, revealing the Hebrew-language inscription “Am Yisrael Chai” (this was a guest performance given by the theater company in 1945; after returning from evacuation, the theater was reestablished not in Kiev, but in Chernovtsy)22.

Under such conditions, one of the primary ways in which Jews could achieve national solidarity was by working together, regardless of rank or social status, to commemorate the victims. The Jews of Kiev came to regard Babi Yar, which they referred to as a “vale of tears,” as a place of memory. On September 29, 1944, the third anniversary of the massacre, “from early morning till late evening, masses of people... military men, workers, public servants, women with children, young and elderly”23 streamed to the site. This gathering was all the more remarkable in light of the fact that it took place on a Friday, a regular workday. Apparently, a decision had been taken to allow Jews who worked at state enterprises and Soviet agencies to visit Babi Yar on that day24. Avrom Kagan reported that Nesia Elgort, who had managed to crawl out of Babi Yar together with her son and found employment at one of the city’s offices following liberation, was permitted to take a day off “in order to visit the ‘vale of tears’ and give vent to her grief....”25

Those years witnessed the rise of a new Jewish topography of Kiev, in which Babi Yar became a key site. Maxim Shrayer has pointed out that in the poem “Babi Yar” Lev Ozerov used the term “Jewish cemetery” as “the most explicit reference to the victims’ Jewishness”: “Beyond Mel’nik Street are hillocks, fences, and vacant land. And the rusty-red wall of the Jewish cemetery. Halt....”26 For his part, Avrom Kagan, in an essay entitled “What I Have Seen at the Kiev Jewish Cemetery near Babi Yar,” takes the opposite tack by underscoring the centrality of Babi Yar. Apparently, the reference to the geographical proximity of these two sites in Kagan’s essay is meant to reflect the symbolic connection between the victims of Babi Yar and those whose memory was desecrated at the Jewish cemetery. The fact that the Nazis had used tombstones and fence railings from the Jewish cemetery to burn the corpses at Babi Yar in August–September 1943 served only to strengthen this link. Kagan writes: “The occupiers decided to pilfer and distribute all the objects which they could not destroy at the Jewish cemetery, since their sole concern was obliterating all traces of the Jewish cemetery in Kiev.” For Kagan, the image of the ransacked and ruined cemetery seems to have become a kind of metaphor, embodying the Nazi intent to erase the very memory of the Jewish past of this city: he mentions the shattered tombstones on the graves of the millionaire Brodsky, the popular Kiev physician Isaac Krugliak, and a righteous Jew who was a relative of the tzadik from Makarov27.

The spontaneous expression of a communal link with the victims, the realization of the scale of the tragedy of Babi Yar, the presence of nationally-minded Jewish intellectuals in Kiev — all this made the leadership of the JAC grasp the need for a more focused and thorough effort to gather their own materials on the massacre of the Jews in Kiev. Apparently, this project was not part of the preparation of the Black Book, which opened with Lev Ozerov’s essay “Babi Yar,” containing a detailed account of the events in Kiev. In a letter sent to the Cabinet of Jewish Culture on May 23, 1945, Shakne Epshteyn, executive secretary of the JAC, proposed that his Kiev-based colleagues “take upon themselves the task of organizing the gathering of materials on the atrocities committed by the Germans against the Jewish population.” He pointed out that “it would be practical to focus primarily on collecting and editing materials pertaining to the Babi Yar tragedy and to other Jewish mass killing sites in Ukraine.”28 These suggestions were made despite the fact that the leadership of the JAC was well aware of the work of the Extraordinary State Commission; they may also have been apprised of the activities of the Commission for Compiling the Chronicle of the Great Patriotic War, and of the information-gathering carried out by military and NKVD personnel. The idea of erecting a monument at Babi Yar seems to have been born in Kiev during these same months. In July 1945, Eynikayt published an article by Mire Ayzenshtadt entitled “A Monument at Babi Yar,” which included a detailed sketch of such a monument and alluded to budgets allocated for its construction. However, the text of the article made it clear that the monument would not indicate that most of the victims were Jews. When describing the monument, the author of the article compensates for the lack of information regarding the Jewish component of Babi Yar by explicitly referring to the Jewishness of most of the 140,000 persons shot at the site29.

The Soviet View of the Jewish Babi Yar

The inconsistent nature of wartime Soviet ethnic policy led to a certain ambivalence in the portrayal of the events at Babi Yar. David Brandenberger’s remark that the policy of encouraging Russian nationalism during the first years of the war “should be considered more of a tendency than an articulate central line”30 can also be applied to the treatment of the subject of Babi Yar in the press — both during the first war years and in the period 1944–1945. However, it became much less applicable by the end of the war.

On the one hand, both in November 1941 and in November 1943 the central Soviet press provided rather detailed information on the murder of tens of thousands of Jews at Babi Yar; on the other hand, the official Soviet press release of January 1942 (“Molotov’s Note”) downplayed the anti-Jewish nature of Nazi policy: it spoke of “52,000 men, women, elderly people, and children” as a single group, while simultaneously referring to the murder of all “Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews who gave any sign of their loyalty to Soviet rule”31 — as though these were another group. Moreover, the official announcement of the Extraordinary State Commission concerning the events at Babi Yar, which was issued on March 1, 1944, avoided any mention of the victims’ nationality. This version was the outcome of a lengthy correspondence between Shvernik, Chairman of the Commission, and Aleksandrov, head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee (this was the department that actually removed the reference to the Jews); Khrushchev and Molotov were also involved in this affair. This formulation served as the basis for the subsequent official discourse of silencing the Jewish victims of Babi Yar32.

Nevertheless, throughout the war years the presence/absence of the Jewish element in texts dealing with the Babi Yar massacre depended largely on the willingness of the individual authors (Jews and non-Jews alike) to engage with the Jewish theme, as well as on the attitude of specific editors and low- and mid-level Party functionaries.33 On January 9, 1945, the newspaper Radians’ka Ukraina published an article by the author Rafail Skomorovski entitled “We Shall Not Forget, We Shall Not Forgive! The Blood-Soaked Ravine.” It contained references to the particular fate of the Jews. One of the episodes mentioned in the article, which was largely based on the testimony of a Ukrainian woman named Tamara Mikhaseva (who was married to a Jew, Petr Reznikov), was a local shooting operation that had taken place in Kiev prior to the main massacre of September 29. Tamara pointed out that the elderly victims who had been arrested in the synagogue and driven to the killing site in cars had to use an automobile on the Sabbath for the first time in their lives (“A detachment of soldiers with machine-guns surrounded the synagogue building. The elderly men were led to the cars. Prior to that day, they had never ridden in a car on the Sabbath”). In this way, the author drew attention to the victims’ ethnic and religious affiliation. Tamara then went on to discuss the Nazis’ special attitude toward the Jews, which was clearly manifested “on the day of Babi Yar”:

On the day when they issued the nameless order according to which all Jews had to go to Babi Yar... and all those who dared to hide the Jews would be shot... On that day, people were making up all kinds of nonsense. Some said it was a labor mobilization; others, that it was a resettlement; still others claimed that the German high command had negotiated a prisoner exchange: one Jewish family for one German POW.34

The most complex question is the depiction of the Jewish aspect of Babi Yar in poetry and in the visual and plastic arts. Unlike journalistic articles, which often tackled the Jewish theme head-on (even in the Russian-language press), poetry tends to be based on allusions, allowing the readers to complete the chain of associations on their own. Whereas Ehrenburg devoted considerable space to Jewish matters in his journalistic writings (as late as 1944), he refrained from referring to the murder of the Jews directly in his poetry; this holds true even for the well-known cycle of poems about Babi Yar which he composed in 1944. Nevertheless, the very fact of Ehrenburg’s authorship enabled his audience to guess the identity of the victims who lay in the ravines and called out to the reader from every pit.35 In all likelihood, the Jewish readership invariably interpreted this cycle — and especially its first poem, “What Use Are Words and Quill Pens,” which would later come to be known as “Babi Yar” — in a Jewish context. The Jewish theme is invoked somewhat more explicitly in Lev Ozerov’s poem “Babi Yar,” where, in Shrayer’s view, the poet gives “the victims a voice to speak their last will and testament.”36 At the same time, readers could easily generalize the literary depiction of the events of the Holocaust at any given location, projecting it onto similar events that had taken place elsewhere. Evdokiia Olshanskaia recalled how, in the spring of 1945, the Jews of Kiev would go so far as to read Ilya Selvinsky’s 1942 poem “I Saw It!,” which dealt with events in the Crimea, within the general context of the Holocaust:

It spoke of the mass shooting of Jews in the Crimea. But the Kiev readership interpreted it as a depiction of the tragedy of Babi Yar.... For this reason, the poem ‘I Saw It!’ became a veritable ‘hit’ in Kiev; it passed from hand to hand, was copied and learned by heart.37

Even David Hofshteyn’s poem “Kiev,” which appeared in Eynikayt38 and was dedicated to the city’s liberation, made no mention of the events at Babi Yar. It contained only calls for revenge on “the entire generation, the whole country that was born in disgrace” for “the shame of the two dreadful years” in Kiev. Such calls were a staple of wartime literature and journalism, including texts written in Yiddish. The notion of a special “Jewish” revenge on the Nazis for the Babi Yar massacre is more clearly articulated in Kagan’s Yiddish-language essay “The Kiev ‘Vale of Tears’ on September 29, 1944,” which apparently was never published in the Soviet Union. The author conveys this idea through the tale of First Lieutenant Azriil Shtarkman, who comes to Kiev after a period of active frontline service to discover the fate of his relatives, and finds himself in Babi Yar on September 29, 1944, the day of the yortsayt. Kagan writes how Shtarkman “stood dejected, listening to the memorial prayers recited by the God-fearing Jews in memory of his murdered relatives.” The author uses traditional Jewish names to underline the Jewishness of the First Lieutenant and his murdered father, as well as his connection to the victims of Babi Yar. During this period, there was a real possibility of emphasizing the national identity of Jewish victims, of evoking Jewish associations, and even of referring positively to the Jewish religion — all of which had not been conceivable before the beginning of the war (There was a religious subtext, for example, in an article by Skomorovski).39 In a style typical of wartime Yiddish-language Soviet journalism, Shtarkman proclaims his eagerness to take revenge on the Nazis before the assembled Jews: “I, Azriil ben Yakov HaCohen Shtarkman, do hereby swear to you that I shall cut the murderers into pieces. I am going back to the front... Believe me, and have faith in my revenge....”40

Another, even less clear-cut case is that of non-Jewish poets who wrote about Babi Yar without touching directly on the Jewish theme. The reason for this omission is unclear: did it stem from the fact that the victims’ nationality was obvious to everyone (all residents of Kiev were aware of the identity of those murdered at Babi Yar in September 1941)? Was it a conscious attempt to silence the Holocaust in a manner typical of the Soviet bureaucracy and segments of the intelligentsia? Or could it have been the result of an intervention by editors and Party functionaries as the texts were being prepared for publication? An example of such an ambiguity is Volodymyr Sosiura’s poem “Babi Yar,” which appeared in the newspaper Kyivs’ka pravda on December 15, 1943. The poem’s central message is a call to avenge the victims — a motif that resonated throughout most works written at the time. The Jews are mentioned nowhere in the text. The only oblique allusion to this theme can be seen in the following lines:

However, we have no reason to suspect Sosiura of intentionally downplaying the victims’ ethnicity — at a Jewish anti-fascist evening program that took place in Ufa in September 1942, Sosiura recited his poem “To the Jewish People,” which opened with the words: “You have passed through the night, through pain, through centuries of persecution, through the smoke of pyres, through the wild haze of pogroms.”42

The task of painters and sculptors who wished to convey the Jewish component of Babi Yar was even harder, since they had to avoid obvious ethnic symbols (Stars of David, menorahs, Tablets of the Law, Torah scrolls, or Hebrew letters). Adolf Strakhov-Braslavsky sculpted some high reliefs (such as Ravine of Death) that were dedicated to Babi Yar and to the Green Mountain in Berdichev.43 These reliefs were presented to the public at an arts exhibition that was held in Kiev (apparently, in May 1944), and the visitors invariably interpreted them as Jewish images. According to a description given by Avrom Kagan, who had grown up in Berdichev and resided in Kiev, the Ravine of Death relief foregrounds the figure of a young mother with a baby in her arms; a German soldier is snatching the baby away, intending to toss it into a pit filled with the murdered. In Kagan’s view, another segment depicts a Jewish boy lying helplessly in the arms of a German who is dragging him toward the ravine. Finally, there were figures whose Jewishness was indisputable: elderly men with long, patriarchal beards.44 In 1945, Vlasov proposed to erect a monument depicting a mother with her child at Babi Yar, but this project failed to materialize, and its contemporary reception is unclear. The available evidence indicates that the monument was not supposed to include any overt ethnic symbols. And yet, both the mother and the child sculpted on the high relief of the monument were intended to have curly hair, and this detail hinted at the ethnic origin of the largest group of victims — the residents of Kiev, who had lived through the Nazi occupation, were well aware of the grave danger that had hung over the heads of those with curly hair; such hair invariably meant summons to the German Police, lengthy interrogations and examinations.

Needless to say, the authors and editors of all texts, including those published in Eynikayt, had to toe the line laid down by Agitprop [Agitation and Propaganda Party Department] functionaries: any discussion of the murder of Jews must also mention the killings of Russians and Ukrainians.45 An example of such a text is Bergelson’s essay about Kiev, which was published on November 11, 1943. There, the author says that the Germans needed Kiev in order to “plunder it, expel its inhabitants.... In order to bury alive in pits tens upon tens of thousands of Jews half-shot to death, half-still alive, [and] to murder Ukrainians and Russians at the same site.”46 Any hints of interethnic tensions were prohibited by the censors. Thus, the published version of Mizhiritski’s article omits the lines suggesting that, despite the cooperation during the planning and execution of the escape from Babi Yar, the two groups of inmates — the Jews and the Ukrainian partisans — tended to avoid each other in the camp. Furthermore, the Ukrainian and Jewish texts that remained unpublished or censored gave conflicting interpretations of the reasons for the failure of one of the escape attempts: in March 1944, in a conversation with the secretary of the city committee of the Kiev Komsomol, Vladimir Kuklia, one of the Ukrainian escapees, claimed that they had been betrayed by a Jew who had revealed the plan to the Germans.47 The archived version of Mizhritski’s article, untouched by censors and editors, asserts that one of the Ukrainian partisans was caught with an iron scraper in his hands, in the act of digging a tunnel; he then betrayed the names of all of his co-conspirators; Kuklia himself, who had thought up the scheme of escaping by digging a tunnel in the first place, managed to stay alive only thanks to the help of Yakov Steiuk, a Jew from Bukovina, whereas another 16 inmates were shot.48

* * *

As we can see, the wartime Russian- and Yiddish-language publications dealing with the murder of Jews at Babi Yar contained enough information to enable the discerning and experienced Soviet readership to grasp the special fate of the Jews under Nazi occupation. Up until the end of the war, there was no blanket ban on discussing the Jewish component of Babi Yar, despite the increasing tendency to silence this discussion in the ranks of the Soviet bureaucracy. This latter tendency clashed with the aspirations of the Jewish intelligentsia, which employed various methods to underscore the Jewish element of Babi Yar, both in written texts (in Yiddish, Russian, and Ukrainian) and in visual art. It was crucial for them to show that, despite the murder of tens of thousands of Jews in Babi Yar, the history of the Jews in Kiev was not over. At the same time, the memory of the Jewish past — including the commemoration of the victims, which was manifested in the mass gatherings of Jews at the site on the day of the yortsayt, and in other ways — became an integral part of the consciousness of Soviet Jewry.

I am thankful to Vadim Altskan and Shlomit Shulhani for their valuable suggestions and remarks during the preparation of this article. I would also like to thank Tatiana Batanova for her help in obtaining certain materials.